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The limits of discourse
structure: The hysteric
and the analyst
Ellie RaglandSullivan
a
a
Department of English, University of
Missouri
Available online: 16 Jul 2008
To cite this article: Ellie RaglandSullivan (1988): The limits of discourse
structure: The hysteric and the analyst, Prose Studies: History, Theory,
Criticism, 11:3, 61-83
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The Limits of Discourse Structure:
The Hysteric and the Analyst
Discourse of the Master Discourse of the University
g, impossibility
v
- S2 > a
impotence
$ < a SI < $
is clarified by its regression is clarified from its "progress" in the:
from the:
Discourse of the Hysteric Discourse of the Analyst
9 S impossibility
v
impotence
S2 S2 < SI
The places are those of: The terms are:
the agent the other SI, the master signifier
the truth the production S2, knowledge
$, the subject
a, the beyond "enjoyment"
(jouissance)
Jacques Lacan, chapter II, "A Jakobson" in Siminaire XX (1972-1973), p.21.
In his essay "A Jakobson" spoken in Siminaire XX (19-27) taught in
1972-1973, Jacques Lacan said:
I will recall here the four discourses that I have distinguished.
There are only four founded on this psychoanalytic discourse that
I articulate by four places, each one from the grasp of some effect
of a signifier, and that I situate [the analytic discourse] last in this
unfolding. (20)
Lacan then wrote out the four discourse structures in question, as well
as their terms. The places that Lacan located in the discourses are these:
agent other
truth production
The terms used in setting out the four discourses are: SI, the master
signifier, S2, knowledge; $, the subject; a, the beyond of jouissance (the
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62 Prose Studies
something more than jouir) (Sim. XX 21). But the terms themselves
produce immediate difficulty unless one has a sense of what Lacan
meant by them. The agent, in brief, is the position from which a
discourse is enunciated: from a place of authority (master signifier -
SI); from a place of knowledge (a subject's generalized signifying
network - S2); from a position of the split itself between conscious and
unconscious life ($); or from a position of desire (a). Now the master
discourse speaks from the position of agent in the name of S1 or some
referent to authority. The university discourse is enunciated from the
position of S2 or the knowledge that informs teacher or student. The
hysteric's discourse is spoken from the place of lack - $ - where a lack in
identity is put forth as a problematic, implying that neither knowledge
or being are in and of themselves whole. The Analyst speaks from an
impossible position, but one on which Lacan based the ethics of
psychoanalysis, from the position of desir(ing) itself - a - desire being
the subject matter of the analysand's unconscious.
It is fascinating that Lacan considered these four discourses to be the
only ones founded on the analytic one. There is, he said, always some
emergence of each passage from one discourse to another from the
analytic one (Sim. XX 20). But what could this mean? Lacan explained
in "A Jakobson" that he was not speaking of linguistics, but from
his own linguisterie.
20
What, then, measures the distance between
linguistics and linguisterie'] Lacan said love is the sign that one has
changed discourse. What is not a sign of love is the jouissance of the
Other - that of the Other sex - and the body that symbolizes it (20-21).
But
changing of discourse - that moves, that (ga) you, that us, that
traverses itself, no one is immune to its impact But it is useless for
me to say that this notion of discourse is to be taken as a social link,
founded on language, and seems then not to be without relation-
ship with that in linguistics which specifies itself as grammar. (23)
But what is the link between love and discourse, that which has the
effect of a signified (21 and 23)? On one hand, love proceeds by
collusion of identificatory traits, an attraction to familiar ones or to
desirable ones. In the Symbolic order of language, love is a relationship
to desire to what one represses, denies, or does not wish to know
about the Other. "I love you" is an easy way to pretend that all problems
are solved. Alcibiades ends all debate with affirmation in Plato's Sym-
posium (The Four Fundamental... 225). Socrates' "what is love?"
begins debate, and his refusal to consummate the questions regarding
the relationship of love to desire links the debate to one concerning
knowledge. Lacan taught that love arises from structure and speaks
variously as Master, academic, Hysteric and Analyst. But finally the
desire to know is the desire to know the Other. Desire of and for others
serves merely as a lure or decoy.
Love, with its co-extensive side of hate, are Lacan's names for the
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 63
transference which appears in analysis. But what does the analysand
love? Is it the child he might have been? The parent he never had? The
Analyst as some more perfect model of reality? Lacan's answer to these
questions is no. The analysand loves what might have been in the
desiring context of what might come to be. That is, he loves the image or
fantasies of a missed encounter with whatever will set his world right.
But he thinks he loves (or hates) the Analyst, the one who knows only
this: that the analysand's desire is alienated in absent meanings where
he looks for solutions and idealized answers in things which can never
make him whole. We begin to see why there is passage from one
discourse to another - from Master to University to Hysteric to Analyst
- based on the idea that love is always already deceived when love
thinks it can pinpoint the solutions to personal or human dilemmas in
people, things or ideologies. Although love may appear to be both
problem and answer, Lacan thought it must be separated from desire if
one is to "see clearly." Love is narcissistic and ego-oriented while desire
is on the side of the Other. Lacanian analysts aim to orient analysands
away from love, toward desire; away from seeking answers in persons
toward seeking meanings in their knowledge. But love blocks know-
ledge of desire as Other desire that has two slopes. In the ego place of
knowledge there is a "truth" (or fiction or fantasy or founding myth) of
meaning by which a person justifies her or his life. On the other slope, a
Real hole in knowledge and being links the Symbolic and the Imaginary
to the jouissance of loss itself. The object a is the excess "beyond" that
links grammar to jouissance. Put another way, the unconscious signify-
ing chains - made up of Real.Symbolic.Imaginary orders, linked by a
paternal metaphor - find a final referent or orientation in the hole in the
Other from which jouissance arises (Tout ce que Vous Avez ... 215).
The structure of knowing and being articulates itself around a blockage
or void that denotes traumatizing effects that remain present in a life,
but which are not symbolized in (un)conscious knowledge. Not
surprisingly, this writing of the Real appears in conscious life as partial
"drives" related to the body, and in symptoms that write themselves
enigmatically on the body.
But before proceeding to discuss Lacan's theory of discourse, we
must consider the mathemes or signifiers that make up the terms of his
theory. Indeed, it will help to reconsider Lacan's definition of signifier
away from its Saussurean meaning of sound or letter. Signifiers do not
automatically equal language or language sounds because elemental
inscriptions are symbols which Lacan defined as irreducible units of
meaning that do not define themselves necessarily in relation to
anything else, but from which meanings build nonetheless (Jacques
Lacan and the... 169). But if a signifier cannot signify itself because it is
diacritical, oppositional or differential, how do we know what a signi-
fier is? Moreover, how does one distinguish a signifier from a signified?
A signifier, Lacan said provocatively, is what represents a subject for
another signifier. That is, meaning is made by the binary function of
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64 Prose Studies
differentials that also point to a relation. But once a given signifying
chain is constituted, is imposed on a physical body as language, the
ensembles of associations built up do not reveal their beginning, middle
or end easily, if ever. The point is that the "subject" is constituted from
the ground up, so to speak. The "base" signifying chains in the
unconscious are imposed by the Symbolic and Imaginary, and each
produces a Real. Images and words constitute association^ links
which, in turn, produce certain traumatic (thus unsymbolized) effects.
These return in conscious life to insist in and in-form the language
already organized into grammar. But in the unconscious, signifying
chains are closed off or enigmatic because they are an effect of time.
When we think or speak, these chains "speak" us, hiding the fact that
we make a trip at lightning speed in order to produce knowledge,
knowledge that is somewhere, not no-where. The effect of imposing
language on the human organism produces not only an alienation
structure (castration), then, but signified as well. Put another way, the
unconscious uses language to reproduce itself in consciousness as
meaning effects (or person-specific signifieds). Signifiers first consti-
tute the "said" - the dit, being, identity, statements - which later return
as signifieds. But in the saying of what returns - the dire, desiring,
knowing, the unconscious-jowmance effects are also attached. The
articulation or statement - the other signifier or S2 - is positivized in
Lacan's view around the void of loss itself. Thus, Lacanians distinguish
between signification or meaning and sens (or a meaning outside
conventional meaning). The first is on the side of the signifier (the
Repra'sentanz), and the second on the side of the objet a (the Vor-
stellung) {The Four Fundamental.. .220). That is, the Repr&sentanz is a
signifier that does not make meaning by taking the other into account
qua presence. Signifiers simply represent functions. Meaning as sens,
on the other hand, comes into play as the Vorstellung which situates the
subjectivity of every subject in a series of "objects" from which he is
suspended (221). Insofar as the referent of the function of representing
is not obviously there, but bom of the articulation itself, by using
language we automatically produce something new. People have
usually thought "full" meaning is produced. In the 1960s Lacan used
the S2 as the binary signifier that pointed to the subjectivity in meaning.
Later he taught that the objet a is produced, the objet a being the
only absolute. Every other object clings to a relation (Le Sinthome,
unpublished Seminar). Thus Lacan turns the word "object" away from
its phenomenological sense of being a "thing" out there, a sense one
reifies in essentializing objects or imagos or texts in the world. Things
that "seem" to be out there are subjective meanings that constitute and
order subjects in a field (the Symbolic and Imaginary) alien and
extrinsic to them, but from which they perceive and speak.
In Siminaire XI Lacan showed the objet a as discontinuous, partial
drives that can only be made to seem consistent in language. What we
are dealing with is a theory where the signifier replaces the thing (or
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 65
object meaning) to try to contain the desire that is always present as lack
and as "drive." The function of the word becomes the necessity to
presentify the discontinuity of the subject ("Apartes" 31). That is, it is
not the representation that is replaced. Rather, the signifier irrealizes
the relation of signifier to signifier and rejoins the Real. In this theory
the objet a becomes a writing of the Real, shining through the emptiness
of Symbolic order meanings to show that representation occurs only as
long as meaning represents a void reference, or what Lacan called a
negative (-S):j5 ("Sept remarques..." 10). In looking at Lacan's
discourse structures we will see that any matheme in the position of
"truth" is under the bar of consciousness, repressed in the ideal ego
position. But in the position he calls production (of meaning and
jouissance effects) we find the place of the Other. We remember that
the Other is the place of the unconscious and that it is not only opaque to
conscious life, but is also an ensemble of signifying chains surrounding a
void or loss itself: $ (A). Whatever appears under the bar in the
discourses, however, will return in conscious life and language as
enigmatic, discontinuous, as an impasse or a cut, as something that
disrupts supposed harmonies, making unconscious fictions or desire
present
The master discourse, for example, will make the mistake of
equating what is known (said or written) with what is represented
as an authoritative posture. Lacan is aware that any discourse will of
necessity produce something of this effect. Yet, his theory that there is
no meta-language, only concrete language, argues that this referent is
itself lost in the saying or writing. Only in the movement of language
itself, as something of desire or jouissance spills over, will one know of
an unconscious presence in grammar or writing of the Real that
constitutes an energetics on the side of entropy and death drive. It
follows, then, that Lacan will say that meta-language cannot signify the
language of human experience. It can only determine such experience
as objectified in some system since signifers are not pinned to signifieds
anyway, certainly not unless they knot together to create a point de
capiton. By SI then, Lacan creates a master signifier, or a signifier for
knowledge that is certain for a time as against the reifications of
subjective "truth" that language engenders on the side of S2. S2 is a
signifier for knowledge that is true anytime insofar as it is relative to its
own reifications. But the master discourse errs because the truth of the
self cannot be said in any eternally true (S2) or finally certain (SI) way.
As Helene Muller puts it in "Another Genesis of the Unconscious,"
any demand is for Being as such, but such demand will always miss the
true object of its request since the subject gains determination by losing
again and again the object in which it finds temporary certainty. This
"object" is the objet a where being and nothingness flow in and out of
each other, placing the Imaginary and Real in language where
the (meta-) language is bound to remain indeterminate. Only a
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66 Prose Studies
language reduced to a pure Symbolic would be capable of
isolating such an Imaginary. The reduction takes place, but it
cannot go beyond the choice of one particular imagery at the
expense of another. In regard to this choice, humans are "free",
i.e. they have a space for invention. ...Yet for precisely the
reason that humans are free to choose between images, they are
not free to choose between poetic licence and scientific truth.
They cannot but speak the truth through their lies - the common
conditions of Bildung. ("Another Genesis..." 14-15)
Helene Muller goes on to equate Bildung with Being and Narcissism.
It follows, then, that the master discourse base its authority on
locating the $ in the place of truth. What is true for the "Master" is that
division is repressed, that what she or he knows is what there is to know.
For Master's language seems transparently self-referential, or simply a
tool for referring to things or events. Yet, this discourse stressed the
verb "to be." If the Master were to admit to the narcissism implicit in his
discourse - m'itre/to-be-me - no one could be duped by the words
spoken. For the master discourse depends above all on the following:
that his signifier command the other, that it be first and foremost
imperative (Sim. XX 33). Now what does this have to do with love?
Everything. The Master remains a Master - free from questioning the
borders of his being anchored in his knowing - by equating his value
with the other's acceptance of his knowledge (S2) as the definition of his
being. Slavoj 2i2ek calls this move the symbolic economization of
narcissus which acts as if the reduction of the functioning of the binary
signifier S2 to itself - by dismissing any master signifier or SI - were
possible (Tout ce que... 177). Any questioning of the master discourse's
knowledge in terms of its authority, its basis, its proof, hystericizes the
speaker of that discourse by putting into question the limits of his/her
being. Such limits are that on which identity depends in the point of a
signifier that does not know it functions from the signifieds created by
signifiers in the first place (Tout ce que... 177). The hidden dimension in
a Master's discourse, then, is the signifier rriitre/to-be-mo which
pretends that one can give oneself a being, no matter what kind of
innate causality is found in the explanation of that which is enigmatic
(why one is musical, why one is not, etc.).
Lacan brings us to a point that is difficult to understand, but necessary
if one is going to entertain his notion that the subject and body are
joined by language. The Symbolic, says Lacan, is that which ex-ists. It is
extrinsic to being, and thus is not to be confused with being. Put another
way, the unconscious is an absent Symbolic. The analytic discourse
distinguishes itself from all others by this axiom.
I speak without knowing it. I speak with my body, and this without
knowing it. I always say more than I know, then. It is there that I
[Lacan] arrive at the meaning of the word subject in the analytic
discourse. What speaks without knowing it makes me "I" (je),
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 67
subject of the word. That does not suffice to make me a being.
That has nothing to do with what I am forced to put into this
being - enough knowledge to maintain oneself, but not one
drop more. It is what one has called form up to now. In Plato,
form is the knowledge that fills up being. But form cannot
know more about itself than what it says. It [form] is real in
the sense that it holds this being in its cup, but at the rim.
It [the form] is the knowledge of this being. The discourse
of the being supposes that the being is, and that is what holds it
together. (Sim. XX 108)
The being of philosophy its fundamental reality that is - is only a
signified induced or inferred by the signifier, were it only by the word
"to be" (Que veut une femme? 206). But the true Real, the referent,
must be situated beside this signified where Lacan placed the objet a.
Being, then, is an effect of the signified. Knowledge is an effect of the
signifying chain. But all this stays confusing unless one realizes where
Lacan has placed us with his rethinking of the terms signifier and
signified. In Medieval times, it was thought that word and object
were the same thing until William of Ocam, Duns Scotus, and other
questioners freed the object of its essence and invented Nominalism
("Renaissance Subject..." unpublished MS). The Nominalistic move
made the word refer to the thing. In this century Ferdinand de Saussure
came along and taught that language is a system of arbitrary relations
where the signifier (acoustic image) refers to the concept in a continual
exchange of binary oppositions. Although various refinements of
Saussure's thought have been made, the principal reconceptualizations
of his invention of the sign (s/S) are attributable to Jacques Lacan and
Jacques Derrida. For Derrida, the bar between sound and meaning
severs the connection of signifier to signified, and allows an end-
less movement of intertextual deferrals and substitutions. Phonemes
establish difference between one word and another, always referring
such differences as are traceable back to elemental marks of language to
yet another word. Linguistic problems such as "the cat sat on the mat"
are transformed to infinite atomization in which cat/mat/sat empty out
any supposed logic or logos attributable to the sentence above as they
travel from one phoneme shift to another.
But Lacan did something quite different in his critique of the
Saussurean sign than Derrida did, something that will take us onto a
terrain where language, body, love, desire and loss itself play logically
interwoven roles in subject constitution and replication. In Lacan's
rethinking we are confronted with a reversal of the signifier over
signified in which the bar is itself a signifier of a division that splits
the subject into conscious and unconscious parts. That is, aphanisis,
flickering in and out, seeing more or less clearly, always intervenes as
unconscious lack to place the unconscious itself as ever intervening
gaps in conscious acts. Moreover, the splitting has a logic that locates
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68 Prose Studies
the signifler for division at a point of origin. By point of origin, I mean
the first countable signifier. In the words of Bruce Henricksen:
Derrida uses the word logocentrism for the belief in an origin that
remains present in texts, a belief he opposes with the argument
that any "self' one can experience is always already a text and not
an origin - that the transcendent origin is always absent ("The
Construction of the Narrator..." 793)
Although Lacan places loss at the centre of everything, indeed, as the
point of origin, it only counts as a void. Countable signifiers, ones that
can be traced within the presence of speech, refer to the act of division
in the name of the law forbidding incest: the law of the paternal
metaphor. With this law, origins are founded in the name of the effect
of difference. That which opposes the mother's body is the signifier for
a father's name: culture over nature. The phallic signifier or paternal
metaphor is the referent to the Symbolic (cultural) order that makes the
difference between the sexes the causal issue at the heart of all other
differences. By his move away from the terrain of language per se onto
that of the effects of language, Lacan will necessarily redefine the
meanings of signifier and signified away from the linguistic concepts
they first represented.
When Lacan says that the signifier cannot represent itself for itself,
this is not merely opinion, but law. That is nothing comes from nothing.
Nothing can make meaning if it does not have meaning on which to
draw. So the signifiers, taken as the S2 whose meaning is made
retroactively in reference to SI, re-present an infant from the start of
life within a field of language or knowledge, not for someone, but for
another signifier. A signifier will only take on meaning in terms of
referential opposition within a chain of such relations. But these
oppositions make meaning in three registers, not just a linguistic one:
the Imaginary imagistic and identificatory one, the Symbolic semiotic
and verbal one, and the Real order of effects. Put another way, the
Lacanian signifying chain is made up of Borromean knots - 9 ^ - that
chain like an interlinked necklace around a hole in being, the hole that
materializes representations, identifications, desire, bodily sen-
sations, perceptions, and so on. Loss is the Real referent - beyond the
paternal metaphor - to which all other referents point. In the
identificatory/verbal realm signifieds are created by signifiers and
return into grammar as the personal language of any one. Since
signifieds move faster than signifiers, meaning is generally located on
the side of the signified/the said, and erroneously taken to be complete
or "full" in itself.
Lacan taught that no analysis of the unconscious - the effect or result
of the putting into a chain of a signifier (S2) - can occur except by
stopping the flow of the chain at a signifier. But one confronts the
problem that the signifying chain is not grammar or Language or
Writing. It is, rather, a chain of R.S.I., knotted by the Father's Name,
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 69
and linked to the body by the impossible jouissance (impossible
because unsymbolized) which comes from the hole Lacan called a
failure in representation. Yet because this chain was put in place by
language, and returns through language, it gives an analyst the means
to see a link between the desire of the Other and the jouissance effects
that emanate from the objet a. We remember that Lacan recon-
ceptualized the idea of how body and language join by his concept of the
cut in its link to the objet a in "The subversion of the subject and the
dialectic of desire in the Freudian unconscious." In this essay Lacan
says the signifying chain in the unconscious has subjective status,
equivalent to primal repression (Urverdrangung).
In our deduction it is easier to understand why it was necessary to
question oneself regarding the function that supports the subject
of the unconscious, to grasp that it is difficult to designate that
subject anywhere as subject of a statement, and therefore as the
articulator, when he does not even know that he is speaking.
Hence the concept of drive, in which he is designated by an
organic, oral, anal, etc., mapping that satisfies the requirement of
being all the farther away from speaking the more he speaks. But
although our completed graph [of desire] enables us to place the
drive as the treasure of the signifiers, its notation as (55 ^ D)
maintains its structure by linking it with diachrony. It is that which
proceeds from demand when the subject disappears in it. It is
obvious enough that demand also disappears, with the single
exception that the cut remains... present in that which dis-
tinguishes the drive from the organic function it inhabits: namely,
its grammatical artifice. (314)
Earlier in the same essay Lacan has prepared us for his innovative
transformation of the Freudian "drive" to the objet a by threading on
one string Hegel's unhappy consciousness as the suspension of a corpus
of knowledge, Freud's discontents of civilization, and his own idea of a
"skewed" relation that separates the subject from the cause of his
sexuality (297). When Lacan spells out his concept of the cut in relation
to the drive, we begin to see the logic of an objet a whose links are to the
body, but whose responses are beyond the simple organic. We begin to
grasp what will drive language in Lacan's theory. It is not rhetorical
tropes, style, nor object relations. Rather, it is the objet a - pieces of the
Real - as partial drives leaning up against the signifying chain.
The very delimitation of the "erogenous zone" that the drive
isolates from the metabolism of the function... is the result of a cut
(coupure) expressed in the anatomical mark (trait) of a margin or
border - lips, "the enclosure of the teeth", the rim of the anus, the
tip of the penis, the vagina, the slit formed by the eyelids, even the
hom-shaped aperture of the ear.... Observe that this mark of the
cut is no less obviously present in the object described by analytic
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70 Prose Studies
theory: the mamilla, faeces, the phallus (imaginary object), the
urinary flow. (An unthinkable list, if one adds, as I do, the
phoneme, the gaze, the voice - the nothing.) For is it not obvious
that this feature, this partial feature, rightly emphasized in
objects, is applicable not because these objects are part of a total
object, the body, but because they represent only partially the
function that produces them? These objects have one common
feature in my elaboration of them - they have no specular image,
or, in other words, alterity. It is what enables them to be the
"stuff, or rather the lining, though not in any sense the reverse, of
the very subject that one takes to be the subject of consciousness.
For this subject, who thinks he can accede to himself by designat-
ing himself in the statement, is no more than such an object.
(315)
But by what means do signifying chains "drive" language? Jacques-
Alain Miller pointed out in "Aetiology: A Discourse on Causes" that
although the unconscious does not have laws, Lacan made sense of the
laws of language: metaphor and metonymy (Third Paris-New York
Psychoanalytic Workshop). Moreover, Miller says that one meaning
given to the bar between the signifier and signified is that of a pure bar of
substitution. Now this is Lacan's formula for metaphor, for the laws
which "drive" language. Metaphor works by substitution in reference
to displacements (metonymy) that remain unconscious. Where there
was one thing present in language, another (concrete) comes to replace
it. The first is suppressed (abstract) because something must support
the second. On the subjective side of knowledge, Lacan offers the
signifying chain. On the objective side the objet a is produced as that
which can be located as the name of the subject's cause. The subject is a
missing link whose cause appears in libido or the residual exchange
between speech and jouissance that marks the Symbolic order: A
I.
Beyond desire Lacan pinpointed a Real knotted obstacle that he
called jouissance, or that which clings in one's being and saying, but
does not wish one's good ("A and a in Clinical Structures" 23). In
Lacan's rethinking of language and discourse, it becomes ever clearer
that the signifier and signified do not reside on the same plane. Indeed,
the unconscious signifying chain travels into grammar to produce
signifieds in ways one might call disruptive or subversive. Yet in
Siminaire XX Lacan reminds us that the qualification of Saussure's
idea that the signifier/signified relationship was arbitrary is incorrect.
Lacan goes so far as to say that even Saussure did not believe this
relationship to be arbitrary, as suggested by his work on anagrams.
Now, what passes for arbitrary, in Lacan's view, is that the effects of a
signified seem to have nothing to do with what causes them. But, Lacan
goes on, if they have this appearance, it is because one is looking for a
Real cause - the serious Real being the serial or that which has
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 71
ordering). The reason the first countable signifier is the phallic one,
within this logic, is that it establishes a position taken towards desire as a
reference point for the fantasies that essentialize or mythologize Being.
Put another way, the references to which the effects of signifieds point
remain approximative or Imaginary. What can one do to make sense of
Lacan's idea that the signifier/signified relation is not arbitrary? One
can accept his invitation to us to interrogate the signifier One, rather
than the multiplicity of ones (signifiers), as Derrideans have done with
such flair. One can also consider his proposal that the indispensable
third in the rapport signifier/signified - that is, the phallus - is precisely
this: that the signified misses it, misses its referent (23). Something
blocks the linkage of signifier to signified. That something is an objet a,
a partial drive whose goal is to be in the circuit of drives rather than to
necessarily culminate in some act aimed at catching the jouissance of
the other (The Four Fundamental...l83).
If the signified misses its referent and the signifier cannot be collected
because it is basically stupid, then how can one talk about a discourse?
The signifier is stupid, in Lacan's eyes, because it carries no message.
People speak to each other essentially to say silly things. But with these
silly things one enters a new subject, that of the unconscious, where a
certain Real can be reached (24-25). What is the value of this action? Is
the goal to laugh? To invent new word games or give freeplay to
nonsense? Not for Lacan. The goal is to alleviate human suffering and
increase individual freedom. This is the Analyst's ethic. But on a larger
scale, Lacan's message is that if we think differently about thinking and
about talking, we also increase our chances for creating better worlds of
all those worlds we touch. So Lacan's ethics is far-reaching, into culture
critique: an ethics of speaking itself, pedagogical practice, medical
praxis, and beyond.
We come back, then, to Lacan's four discourse structures. SI or
the master signifier is a designator that is both rigid and empty at the
same time, an auto-referential moment that is both performative and
excentric in relation to the chain of knowledge or description
delineated as S2. What does SI do then? Slavoj ZiZek says it fixes
consistency (Tout ce que Vous... 177). Put another way, it gives a point
of fixity to desire as it hooks into language. S2 plays on the side of the
Imaginary, substantivizing, essentializing, elaborating founding
myths. Yet between SI and S21ies the matrix of language, according to
Lacan. But there is something more, the symptom which lies beyond
discourse and functions according to the laws of substitutive metaphor.
But how is one to validate such enigmatic ideas? One of Lacan's
answers is by valorizing no-thing. The signifier produced in the chain of
language only appears retroactively, in the action of S2 on S1. But what
stops the infinitization of this chain, either macroscopically or micro-
scopically? In "A Jakobson" Lacan says the signifer is situated at the
level of the substance jouissante (26). That is, while the objet a is the
primordial cause of desire - the Ur-drive - the signifier is the material
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72 Prose Studies
effect of jouissance. Thus, a part of the body is signified (cut or
sacrificed) by a signifier to link jouissance to the signifying chain.
Finally, the signifier also marks the limits of jouissance, the limits of
each person's capacity for taking pleasure in pain (27). Persons are
divided, then, between desire and love. You love in the other what you
lack in the Other. But your jouissance depends on the signifying effects
attached to the objet a.
When Lacan tells us that "discourse" is not grammar, nor do signi-
fiers equal phonemes, although signifiers incarnate phonemes, we are
closer to Pascal's argument that "the heart has reasons that reason does
not know" than to Saussure's linguistics. The analytic discourse sets up
desire as problem and solution. Love andyoMmartce-effects will place
themselves somewhere along the desiring spectrum. Although these
usually seem divorced from, or trivialized in relation to knowledge,
Lacan elevated them above knowledge systems. Such systems become
so many missed encounters with what they actually aim to know. In the
discourse of speaking beings, or the translation of that discourse into
writing, a demand (always a demand for recognition as love) originates
in the voice of a sufferer, either from the body or from thought But
how can one ascertain the unconscious part of that discourse or the
jouissance-cffects that point to knots and gaps that produce suffering?
Unconscious language (Lacan's lalangue) orders the unconscious by
signifying chains, structured in reference to loss and lack. But structure
here does not mean pattern or obvious syntax. It refers to the relation
of the Real.Symbolic.Imaginary and their knotting (or not) by the
paternal signifier. The variations of relation among these orders and
their knot produce a fourth order or term that Lacan named the
Symptom. Every person is a symptom of the unconscious signifying
chains that speak him in the Symbolic and Imaginary. In the Real,
pieces and fragments of the objet a return to punctuate language and tell
the listener or reader something about surplus jouissance, or the
obstacles that block meaning and thus attest to traumatic effects which
do not cease writing themselves at the level of impact, but which are too
painful to symbolize, even in dreams. Art (of all kinds) is the domain
that works with the objet a to try to make sense of jouissance effects.
Still, the idea that art is a product of an enigmatic cause, that of
question(s) as yet unanswered by the artist, is not necessarily clear to
the artist or critic.
Upon returning to Lacan's four discourse structures, we find him
working with four mathcmes, described by Jacques-Alain Miller as
signifiers of fixed functions. In this way Lacan tried to formalize the
truth of his icrit in an effort to decipher a meaning in discourse that
concerns the pre-conditions of meaning. Symptoms convey a message,
but not a linguistic one. And discourses produce symptoms or opaque
metaphors where the Real speaks at the cuts and edges of glances,
sighs, echoes, tones evoked and provoked in reference to chains of
signifying material. The objet a concerns jouis-sens, not grammatical
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meaning or information. The unconscious is a concrete discourse. It ex-
ists - is exterior to - in language. But it only ex-ists clearly in the
Hysteric's discourse. All other cultural discourses are merely grafted
onto the unconscious, evoking, implying, but the unconscious insists,
in the Hysteric's case, that it be listened to. Put another way, the
Hysteric is identified with the desire of the Other. Only her structure
opens a clear path to the unconscious where hysterics led Freud.
Hysterics desire the Other's desire, and so their desire is to show the
Other. Just a quarter turn from the Hysteric's structure, Lacan writes
the Analyst's desire as impossible, the desire to represent the cause of
the subject's desire of which the subject is unaware: a - $. If the
analysand comes to grapple with the cause of desire in terms of what
falls out of the chain - not only the subject ($), but the objet a as well -
there where cuts respond to or evoke the gaze of the superego or its
voice (only indirectly connected to a glance from the eye or the words
enunciated by self or other) - then he has a chance to become aware of
his position within structure. He or she has a chance to know what their
language and life elaborate around lack (desire) and beyond it (plus-
de-jouir) where Freud discovered a uselessness of the unconscious.
This is the death drive which, paradoxically, commands an apparently
free life and discourse from an energetics that resides on the side of
masochism and pleasure in suffering.
There is no thermodynamic explanation of energy in Lacan, nor any
Freudian energy of pleasure that resides at the level of primary process
fantasy and wish fulfilment. In Lacan's discourse structures energy will
move from a treasury of signifiers catalyzed by the objet a to reveal that
both language and the body are affected by structure (Television 26).
The oddities of "drive" mean that energy is only ever a constant in
reference to the One (the signifier for the illusion of unity, basis for
constructing scientific experiments, the One supposed to know at
whom the hysteric aims her discourse). On the erotic side, "drive"
concerns jouissance as it affects knowledge, and sustains itself by
dismantling and reassembling a relation to the body's rims and open-
ings. Curiously, these dismantlings and reassemblings reveal the
Freudian superego as a symptom of civilization, not a sign of some
discontent in it. Repression is primary and concerns a mapping of the
oral, anal, scopic and invocatory drives (the objet a) as they illuminate
the more in language than language that conveys meaning, even if the
meaning is enigmatic. "To follow the thread of the analytic discourse
leads to nothing less than to break again, than to inflect, than to mark
with its own bend...what, as such, produces the fault, the discon-
tinuity" (Sent. XX 44). In studying the analyst's discourse - the one
from which the others are structured - one may see that in the place of
agent supported by truth - a_ - one finds the subjectivity of the
S2
Analyst's knowledge informing interpretation. Rather than heed her
or his own thoughts, the word transferred onto the Analyst is to be
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74 Prose Studies
taken mathematically by the Analyst as a knowledge that does not
think, calculate or judge, but carries with it the analysand's work-effect
(be it of desire or jouissance). Although the analysand's word bears the
label "no return to sender," the Analyst must ascertain where the
language breaks and attribute to the analysand the knowledge that
gives a false consistency to his life and desire through illusions of all
sorts.
The Analyst's discourse will teach the analysand that there is no
meta-language. Metaphorical substitutions of a word, an image, a
feeling, a wish, and so on, appear as Other language that allows
articulation of demand and desire by the possibility of overdetermina-
tion or substitution. Put another way, an analysand learns that the
referent is not already there in language, but is born of the articulation
itself as objet a, as the surplus\ jouissance-effects language tries to make
consistent. In this context discourse - whether as a social link or a
psychotic non-link - describes the Real. It is structure inscribing itself
from a Real which creates an obstacle or non-contingent barrier, linked
to the non-identity to itself of the subject's being ("Apartes" 31). The
letter kills the thing and sends das Ding into the Real where it is
unsymbolized in a disembodied writing that writes ceaselessly all the
same. It is the signifier that replaces the thing, then, not the objet a
which is das Ding. In non-psychotic discourse the objet a implies a kind
of logical consistency that gives jouissance a place, but only because
jouissance (re)places the objet a. Yet in psychosis the objet a is not lost.
It shows the face of its jouissance in a passion or agony without limit.
In the master discourse structure the impossibility of SI' s becoming
one with its own knowledge (S2) is inherent in the very act of speaking.
To tally one's authority to one's knowledge flies in the face of the
structure of language which is marked by suture. One only speaks
because words have already been put in place and are bodied out by the
objet a that materializes them not only in relation to the lack they
purvey, but also in reference to the lost objects they seek to re-
encounter in some illusory correspondent dream of a Oneness. What
happens instead is that master signifiers close out intimations of
Otherness by appeal to any authority that brooks no doubt. This is
another way of saying that the word kills the thing, or that humans are
"castrated" by the structure of alienation, eclipsed by the signifier. The
jouissance gained in the master discourse - S2 - uses knowledge to close
out the "truth" of division or any recognition of something beyond his
or her control.
Lacan's analytic discourse structure aims to break down the resistance
that blocks learning who one is (based on who one was), to better
realize who one wants to be. We face an unlearning in the service of a
learning that can yield greater freedom and creativity. Subjects are not
fixed entities, unified by cement glue. Subjects are functions of the
desire and jouissance that continually intervene in the illusions of
consistency. The subject is "supposed" from an Other place, and
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 75
supposes itself consistent through fantasy and language, association^
thoughts that function to screen out knowledge of the unconscious
savoir. This makes all resistance resistance to recognition of desire or
anything beyond it (Freud, anti-pedagogue 163). If indeed the law of
the signifier is to produce the effects of a signified, effects which appear
to have nothing to do with what causes them (neither signifying chains
nor objet a), then it becomes important for any pedagogy to rethink
itself. The university discourse maintains its raison d'itre by taking the
master signifier itself- authority per se to be a support for the truth of
the knowledge (S2) produced by the agent: S2. Lacan situates the
si
impasse in the university discourse on the way in which such authority is
founded. Academic authority is drawn from something Lacan calls an
impotence, from the division in the subject ($) that causes people to
establish authorities in the first place.
The desire of the professor, like that of the ego psychologist, is that
his knowledge be taken by the other as a statement of truth. Lacan's
critique of psychoanalysis began as an indictment of the ego psychology
orientation in Anglophone psychoanalysis. Later he would propose
that any use of language, except for minimal information exchange, is
an imposition of one's desire - desire being interpretation - on the
other. In this scenario interpretation is at the least anodine, at the worst
destructive. The power of words, their effects capable of creating a
Real place of unsymbolized traumata whose return is nonetheless
palpable, revealed to Lacan that there must be an ethics of psycho-
analysis. This ethics concerns speaking well, speaking for "the good."
Words are not the throwaway debris we treat them as. They are the
material that operates our thought and being from Elsewhere. One
begins to heed the subtle regression from a master discourse to an
academic one, toward Lacan's invention of an Analyst's discourse that
will seek to dwell between Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative for
a transcendental ethics and the Marquis de Sade's insistence that
desire, no matter what it costs the other, is the only good. The master
discourse dismisses the unconscious, just as a patriarchy dismisses the
mystery of Woman as anything to be taken seriously outside a private
context. The university discourse, on the other hand, takes desire into
account, even uses its knowledge in the service of seduction. Lacan
punned on Cythera (Sim. XX 47), calling the university discourse one
that is univers-cythire/ unified towards Cythera, towards seduction.
The Hysteric's discourse is quite another matter. Her desire is to
expose her lack: 8^ In this, Lacan compares the Hysteric's dis-
a
course to that of science, in opposition to the master discourse of
philosophy. But how could a discourse of philosophy be more lethal
than that of modern science whose empirical failings Lacan did not
hesitate to expose? Because classical philosophy works to deny doubt,
equating knowledge with the Master's authority. Lacan has often been
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76 Prose Studies
accused of speaking a master discourse, which is true insofar as he was
the Master of his discourse based on a new way of thinking. But such a
charge - like the signified - misses the point. Lacan argued that the
Analyst's discourse rests on only one certainty: that the way persons
position themselves towards desire - towards the phallus - marks the
way they position themselves towards law (authority, superego, jouis-
sance) as well. And such positioning appears in sexuality, the way one
uses language, and in attitudes towards love and knowledge as well. It is
always "political" when the one's desire imposes itself as the other's
law. Beyond this premise - that things do not go (well or not) naturally
between the sexes - and that this "fact" has far-reaching repercussions
for the reproduction of myths, the organization of institutions, and the
power lines of national concerns - Lacan left everything else open. The
Analyst's knowledge (S2) is that his or her subjectivity underlies desire,
and orients the clinic around what he or she desires for and from the
analysand. If the position itself incarnates a kind of "pure" place of
desire, then, Lacan argued that the ethical demand placed on the
Analyst acts on the realization that an analysand's suffering, arising
from confusion about desire, concerns issues of life or death. Cure, a
by-product, can only occur in some separation of (ego) jouissance-
effects from desire.
Does the Hysteric incarnate lack for the sheer sake of perversity?
Not in Lacan's eyes. She incarnates lack because she sees/lives para-
dox. Her most intimate knowledge is that something is wrong in
knowledge, something missing in Symbolic order myths. She sees
through the emptiness of the phallic signifier without necessarily
knowing that seeing (and embracing) the emperor without clothes
causes her suffering. And paradoxically this knowledge of the empti-
ness of meaning places her in the position to put a Master to work on her
behalf. For she seeks, each in terms of her particular story, to question
knowledge and its Masters up to the limits they incarnate and beyond.
Lacan placed his own discourse between the Hysteric's and Analyst's,
although it - like the subject's discourse stretching over the four comers
of the Schema L - stretched over the many comers of his four discourse
structures. Suddenly we encounter an unexpected paradox. The
Hysteric's discourse is only one quarter turn away from the Analyst's:
a_ &_ And the hysteric's discourse has the same structure as
S2 SI
empirical research, the difference being that the empiricist equates
knowledge with what he sees, with the eye. The Hysteric knows that
what she sees or hears is not it. But she doesn't know what "it" is. Not
knowing she must prove to herself that she ex-ists. Her proof lies in
evoking the presence of the Other. The jouissance of anxiety validates
her being uncertain at best, because she must locate her founding myths
- this is her founding myth - in the place of an other's knowledge. What
she knows unconsciously is that she does not know. This is her glory (in
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 77
Lacan's eyes) and her despair. Her desire to remain lacking - $ -
a
equals her desire to incarnate desire. Lack is present in desire, making
this discourse a discourse about loss. Thus for one who is not anchored
to a signifier for sexual identity in the unconscious - i.e. the Hysteric
whose question is "Am I a man or woman?" - affective proof of an
ontological place becomes primary. That the response comes back
from the Other as a passion of jouissance is not so important as that a
response come back.
In the scientific discourse whose structure Lacan compares to the
Hysteric's, the assumption is a posture of not knowing. Unlike the
Hysteric who seeks answers from the Other who does not wish her
good, empirical science seeks answers in the research project. Para-
doxically, the method itself becomes its own answer, and proof of the
"objectivity" of such method, the falsifiability criterion. Such a dis-
course equates knowing with seeing and dismisses the desire of the
researcher altogether (unless some scandal occurs pointing to some
greed surrounding the question of who knows what centred around
who will win). In 1972 Lacan wrote:
The universe is nowhere else except in the cause of desire, not
even in the universal. It is from this given that the exclusion of the
real originates... of this real that there is no sexual relation, and
this from the fact that an animal has the stability that is language,
that to survive, it is also what makes itself an organ for his body, -
organ which, in order to stand outside thus, determines him in its
function, and this from before he finds it. It is from that very point
that he [man as animal] is obliged to find that his body is not
without other organs, and that each of their functions causes him
problems. (L'etourdit, Scilicet, no. 4)
The movement of scientific research does not differ markedly from
the Hysteric's discourse. She must always seek another signifier -
refuse to anchor herself to any one master signifier - in order to keep
desire unfulfilled. It is not surprising that Lacan wrote the hysterical
discourse as a "social link," an effort at communicating something to
the other. She speaks one truth in myriad voices: the knowledge that
informs her in the place of truth is that the objet a emanates from the
Real of a surplus jouissance and places a certain agony in her discourse -
. She is the thing, like the objet a, that is no-thing. The
a S2
moment her desire is appeased, resolutions found, she must demolish
the illusion of certainty in order that the quest continue. It should come
as no surprise that the Hysteric is protean, able to play any role in hiding
from herself (and others) the "truth" that no answer is her best answer.
Better than anyone else, the Hysteric teaches that thought has a
structure that always puts structure into question, the question con-
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78 Prose Studies
cerning where one's place is in the signifying chain of power and
desirability that continually changes and moves on. Yet, the objet a as
the object that causes desire "drives" her to use language to show
its uselessness, its redundancy, its status as something left over or
excessive in comparison with the death stakes in jouissance. The
Hysteric reveals the satisfaction hidden in the symptom, taken here to
mean an undecipherable enigma that conveys a message to someone.
But since the message concerns unconscious meaning, the symptom is
opaque and requires deciphering of the fact that the unconscious uses
us.
The Lacanian analyst has no special mastery of the unconscious.
What he does know is that the unconscious derails knowledge, makes
knowledge stumble. His desire is to deroute the analysand's narrative
and let unconscious knowledge appear. Lacan wrote that goal like this:
a - $. The Analyst uses the Symbolic to work on the Real, the
goal being to replace the symptom with something else, to replace
the satisfaction afforded by suffering with some new capacity, some
creativity, to de-paralyse speech. So Lacan placed the Analyst's dis-
course among the four he considered as establishing social links. To
de-literalize the analysand's narrative, to contextualize the Other,
to reveal the unconscious as the tim(ing) that an Other knowledge
imposes in one's seemingly synchronic life: these are analytic goals. To
the degree the Analyst succeeds, a social link, a new social link, is
forged for the analysand who was, previously, stuck in a place. But the
new link will not be a better reality model, a new superego (a la
Strachey) or adaptive capacities (a la Hartmann). If, as Lacan taught,
the subject of the signifier is dead - the unconscious signifying chain
made up of dead letters - the goal of the analysand is to verbalize the
secret fantasies by which she structures the world through symptoms.
By smashing the fantasy, life and freedom may be recaptured from
what is already dead in the life one lives.
Lacan's theory of discourse structures includes only one neurosis:
hysteria. Both hysteria and its "brother" patois, obsession, are read-
able questions, structured like a language and linked to two questions:
sexual identity and existence ("Theory of Neurosis," The Second
Paris-New York Psychoanalytic Workshop). The question of sexual
identity is uniquely that of the Hysteric, while the issue of existence,
whether one is dead or alive, concerns everyone (but most particularly
the male obsessional). Now the Hysteric need not answer her question
and indeed, goes against the structuration of her desire if she does. By
keeping her question alive, quite often by posing it in identification
with some male ego, she need not opt for identifying herself as a
woman. Indeed, she may be living proof that signifiers do not pro-
duce other signifiers in the Symbolic. Signifiers copulate only in the
unconscious. What the Hysteric knows in the unconscious is that
nothing will fill her up. One cannot attribute a normative penis=
faeces=baby kind of Freudian feminine quantifier to the Hysteric. She
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 79
knows too much about motherhood, too much about marriage, too
much about the shams of closure. So she opts to stay out of the game
of exchange and resolution, unless she decides to try to become a
"woman" by becoming a mother, or to acquire a name through
marriage ("Mondes impossibles," 76). Yet, she may well opt to stay
completely out of the game which is defined by her refusal to accept
identification with her mother's being. It is clear that the Oedipal
problem of sexual identity - what is the relation between the mother
and the feminine - is not readily solved by motherhood, marriage or
sexual practice for a Hysteric. The hysterical structure is living proof
that some part of the libido cannot be translated in the signifier, cannot
enter the place of the Other.
Jacques-Alain Miller has described the difference between libido
and language by this formula: J - A = (a). That is, Jouissance (or the
affect quota that Freud said cannot be suppressed) from which the field
of signifiers (or representations for Freud), the Autre for Lacan, can be
subtracted, leaves an excess of desire that cannot be transferred to the
place of the Other. The a is that objective component, the cause of
desire that is not assimilated or dissipated by language, but which
remains as a kind of substitution of the libido for language where
causality will always be linked to desire ("Aetiology: A Discourse on
Causes"). At the limit of unconscious structure one finds the gaze. At
the limit of the hysterical structure, one finds the void. Having accepted
the injunction of the Real father, to bend to his law of desire - to eschew
exchange - she does not realize that in evacuating her being in the
service of an Other jouissance she is sacrificing her potential free-
dom and creativity. Enjoined by unconscious desire to stay true to a
denigrated father, to float in the nether land of being neither man or
woman, the impotence in her structure shows up as an impossible
desire: to exist by not existing. Her proximity to the hole in the Other,
to loss itself, places her beyond a comfortable identity position where
the father's name is conventionally knotted. Her lack is a primary one.
The signifier behind which she has not disappeared is the signifier for
castration, the signifier that demarcates sexual difference as a position
taken toward the phallus as object of desire. While a normative woman
bows to the authority of phallic law, a Hysteric identifies with it, but on
the side where it is a mark of lack. She is not the phallus for others, nor
does she possess the phallus. Her sacrifice, then, is of ego as well as
some part of her body.
Like her obsessional brother, the Hysteric speaks a discourse of
stasis. Whereas he uses words as substitute phallic signifiers, speaking
in a superego mode, she uses words in a querulous, interrogatory
fashion. But beware! The Hysteric's "What do I know?" directed
toward a Master is always followed by some form of "What do you
know?" Not only the movement of her discourse - an effort to establish
social links only to break them and reconstitute them again - but
also the symptoms written on her body coalesce to make her the
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80 Prose Studies
quintessence of sexuality, both guilty and glorious. Her glory is her
chastity, what Lacan called a negative perversion. Her guilt comes
from her unconscious knowledge that she can thwart others by calling
into doubt their lack(s), or her awareness that the Other fills her lack. In
either case she is guilty of incest, guilty of remaining true to the opposite
sex partner in the Family Novel, hooked by thejouissance of rejecting
the social bond. Having failed to identify with her mother, or with
women in a general sense, the hysteric allows another's ego to play
the substitute role for her own. In this scenario she is left prey to
unconscious desire, without the dialectical power of adequate ego
conviction to fight. Just as the male obsessional smothers within the
Imaginary closet of his mother's desire, the female Hysteric is only alive
when spurred on by the gaze of sexual desire, a desire which she in turn
rejects or manipulates.
One might think of Hysterics as abandoned daughters. Their mothers
are absent or unacceptable in ways that allow such daughters to make
incestuous bonds with their fathers (although I am not referring to
actual incest here). In adult life the Hysteric's precocious knowledge of
having been preferred by a Daddy who looked to his small daughter to
compensate for what life has not given him, will prevent her from
repressing her childhood in a way that will permit her to exit into the
larger world of social otherness. What is at stake in her impossible
effort to be nothing is nothing other than a life versus death battle. It
seems that the Hysteric'sjouissance does not reside in the sex act per se,
but in the fact of having sexual power. In a Lacanian context one will
conclude that the position of the phallus in the Other determines a
subject's desiring structure, not gender difference per se. At the limit of
the Analyst's discourse where desire is used to try to make the analysand
speak of desire, to prise him or her away from telling Imaginary
narratives, stands the Hysteric's discourse telling the story of a sacri-
ficial offering centred around the lack of a representational signifier for
sexual identity. Her desire is the Other's demand. How much more
haunted could a house be? At the limit point where the Other's desire
becomes the law of others, one finds a problematic surrounding the
sexual relation. Troubled people unconsciously dramatize the trouble
with the "unnatural" sexual stereotypes and roles imposed on human
subjects by language, myth, identificatory models, naming and so on.
In a Lacanian scenario one would never argue that we will cure troubled
people by making them normative, by making them pretend to accept
models that are not inscribed in their unconscious. Moreover, Lacan
argued that the only incurable structure is the normative, the one where
people repress well, yet display their symptoms both psychosomatically
and in truncated Symbolic order discourses. What is one to do then?
Lacan spoke of an ethics of psychoanalysis which enables those who
know it to help attenuate suffering by opening up paths to some
freedom. Unlike Freud, Lacan points to psychoanalysis as a possible
profession, and teaching as a possible profession as well.
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The Limits of Discourse Structure 81
In L'envers de la psychanalyse'. les quatre discours (Simnaire
1969-1970) Lacan says:
I would like to give you this rule of first approximation of the
reference of a discourse: it is that it acknowledges wanting to
master. That suffices to classify it precisely in the kinship line of
the master discourse, and that is of course the difficulty with the
one I try to bring as near as I can to the discourse of the Analyst. It
[the Analyst's discourse] must be found opposed to all desire, at
least attested to, of mastery. I say "at least attested to," not that it
has to hide it, because after all it is always easy to reclothe it in the
discourse of mastery. To tell the truth, we always start from there
in what there is of teaching. The discourse of consciousness.... is
taken up again every day indefinitely - also...the discourse of
synthesis, the discourse of the consciousness which masters....
How can it happen otherwise than to apprehend all this psychic
activity... as a dream, when one hears thousands and thousands of
times in the course of the days this bastard chain of destiny, and of
inertia, of throws of the dies [dice] and of stupor, of false successes
and of misunderstood encounters which make up the current text
of a human life? Do not expect anything more subversive in my
discourse than to not pretend to have the solution. Nevertheless it
is clear that nothing is more burning than what refers to jouissance
in discourse. Discourse touches it constantly in that it moves it
again and tries to return to this origin, and it is in that that it
[discourse] contests any appeasement" (L'envers de la
psychanalyse, 11 February, 1970).
In Siminaire XX Lacan said he had referred the previous year to
the strict equivalence of topology and structure. If we take that as
a pointer, the thing that distinguishes anonymity from what one
refers to as jouissance - to wit what right ordains - is a geometry. A
geometry is the heterogeneity of place; namely, that there is a
place of the Other. What do the most recent developments in
topology allow us to put forward from this place of the Other,
from a sex as Other, as absolute Other?
Here I shall put forward the term "compactness". There is
nothing more compact than a fault [break], if it is quite clear
- given we allow that the intersection of everything therein
enclosed exists in an infinite number of sets - that it follows that
the intersection implies this infinite number. That is the very
definition of "compactness".
This intersection that I am talking about is the one I put forward
a while ago as being what screens, what creates an obstacle to
supposed sexual rapport.
Only supposed, however, since I am stating [e"nonce~] that
analytic discourse rests on no other statement than that there is
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82 Prose Studies
no..., that it is impossible to postulate such sexual rapport. It is in
what the propositions of analytic discourse can show, and through
that same, that the latter determines how things really stand
regarding the status of all other discourses. (14)
Lacan is saying that there is a limit, an orientation of the Real around
jouissance, despite the infinity of possible combinations of words,
images, effects of experiences and states of being. And that limit marks
everything humans do. What is this limit? whatever in our being
presents itself as a break, an intervention of the formula "sexual
being," insofar as being sexed involves our jouissance (p. 16). There
are sexual relations of all kinds. But there is no sexual "relation" - that
is, representation of the opposition male/female - in the unconscious.
This lack of a mark of clear identity for either sex except insofar as each
sex has a relation to a third term - the phallus or mark of lack - inscribed
as the first countable signifier of difference in the unconscious means
that we depend on the duality or substitutability function of metaphor
in order to copulate (and reproduce) at all, even in order to produce
language.
In its simplest and perhaps most complex sense, Lacanian discourse
theory teaches that all discourse organizes itself around a difference
which is quickly mythologized in ways that will place myths at the
"origin" where Lacan finds, instead, problems in structuring meaning
around a minimal enigma with maximum repercussions. Perhaps
Lacan's discourse theory can teach us that we speak from metaphor
because metaphor hides the metonymies on which it depends, hides
from us that Being is doubled, not "autonomous" or unanchored as it
appears. Metaphor copulates, is sexual, points to the couple. Jouis-
sance is written in the Real as a copulation of the Symbolic with the
Real. In that impossible encounter Lacan found joy, pain, the source of
an epistemology of discourse, and the chance for greater freedom for
individuals and societies.
ELLIE RAGLAND-SULLIVAN
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